Tutorial - How to Do Keyword Research For Beginners

A lot of beginners keep asking how to do keyword research so I decided to whip up a quick tutorial.

Now keep in mind, this isn't a guide on finding a profitable niche but once you have one, getting the right keywords will make your job a lot easier.

Step 1 - Google Keyword Tool

Google the "Google keyword tool" and start with some broad keywords for your niche.



1. Start with a broad keyword in your niche for keyword ideas. You'll generally want long tail keywords of 3 to 6 words depending on the competition of your niche. Even as an SEO master who can rank difficult keywords, 10 easy keywords will make more financial sense.

2. Set the targeting to "exact" since broad can be misleading.

3. Filter for appropriate countries or select all for info products.

4. I'd recommend you add filters for at least 1000 searches and for keywords with CPC greater than $1. Usually if people aren't willing to pay at least $1 for clicks, you won't find 'buyers' on those keywords anyway.

Step 2 - Sort by highest volume of searches



Step 3 - Grab some long tail keywords you think are relevant



Just for illustration, I've chosen only one but grab all of them that you think are relevant. Google allows you to save them to a csv to reference later.

Step 4 - Check Initial Competition

The less competition, the easier money will be for you.



You'll want to search the keyword in quotes. As a general rule, look for results less than 50,000 if you're good at SEO and 30,000 if you're not.

This example would be a poor keyword since it has 157,000 results (too much competition).

You'll probably also want to search with this variations as well:

• intitle:"keyword in quotes"
• inurl:"keyword in quotes"
• inurl:"keyword in quotes" inurl"keyword in quotes"

There is no exact rule but the less the better. More often than not, less than 30k is a starting point.

Step 5 - Get the REAL Competition

Of course, you're really only competing with the sites on page 1 or rather the top 5 search results.

A free plugin for Mozilla Firefox called "SEOquake" makes this really easy to do (Google it).



Here you can see the PR and Age of the sites you're competing with.

Sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Ezine Articles, Blogger and other web 2.0 sites are usually a good sign to see in the search results. Things like Wikipedia, About, and Ehow are usually a bad sign.

The more PR 0 and N/A sites the better. In this case, we're seeing PR 4-5 sites which means it's more challenging but of course, this is just an illustration. You'll want to look for low competition.

Step 6 - Check the links of your top competition

There are some good free tools like ahrefs.com and majesticseo.com to see how many links your top competitors have. In this case, I've copied and pasted the top link into ahrefs.com.



The less links the better as you're going to have to beat that.

Also, you can use Market Samurai's free version to help automate some of this but that's another tutorial altogether. Knowing what you're doing by hand is important anyway before you decide to automate.

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What's working for you guys these days and what else would you add to this?